Month: September 2011

As usual, most of the mainstream media did not do a very good job reporting on Obama’s August 30 speech in Minneapolis nor on the protest outside the National Convention of the American Legion to whom he spoke (Minneapolis Star Tribune, Minnesota Public Radio, FOX News.com). The alternative media (and here) did no better in understanding that the real story is about Americans of all backgrounds and political ideologies (libertarians, greens, progressives and fiscal conservatives) uniting in their alarm about the destructive consequences of runaway militarism. Even normally pro-war American Legion members are beginning to recognize the enormous blowback upon military veterans. Certainly environmentalists wanting government to fund projects for sustainable forms of energy agree the war $ should come home. So it was too bad that reporters’ questions mostly stayed within the confines of the two party electoral framework and the political ping pong that keeps the big war game going no matter which lesser-of-two evil politician(s) win. Maybe we should be happy that given the egregious costs of war and bankrupting debt being suffered, there was at least some mention of the wars as a main issue in spite of the contrasting political spins.

Maybe the media will do a better job three weeks from now covering the protest when we get to revert back to focus on the great “Decider” who was first to lie us into the disastrous, illegal wars, the more familiarly-despised face of George W. Bush who has reportedly accepted to come speak at Beth El Synagogue (same synagogue that feted Condoleezza Rice about two years ago) in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. (Synagogue organizers of the upcoming Bush event are apparently selling three tiers of tickets to wealthy supporters to share hors d’oeuvres with Bush on September 21: the Bronze level ticket is $1250, Silver is $2500, and Platinum is $3600. The latter two get preferred seating and a picture with Bush.)

We welcome suggestions for creative signs (especially those transcending counter-productive political partisanship) to display outside the upcoming George W. Bush’s Beth El Synagogue Fundraiser and Rewriting of History! Better yet, stop by and help Come Home America and other advocates of peace and liberty hold banners the evening of September 21 (from 4 -7 pm) outside the Synagogue fundraiser.

Photos below were taken outside Obama’s speech to the American Legion.

Vets for Peace had a great message for Obama.

(When people ask me what’s the difference between “HOPE” and “DOPE”, I tell them not much, just one letter.)

(Come Home America message on display before others came.)
(Originally submitted to Huffington Post.)

From Antiwar.com writer and ally Rick Rozoff:

WordPress suspended the Stop NATO site from posting any new material earlier today, with this announcement:

“Warning: We have a concern about some of the content on your blog. Please click here to contact us as soon as possible to resolve the issue and re-enable posting.”

Repeated efforts to contact them have produced no result.

A year ago Military Times threatened the Stop NATO e-mail list with legal action and, after contacting them and assuming the matter resolved, they got Yahoo Groups to threaten to shut down the list and even cancel my personal e-mail account.

Material on the WordPress site has been backed up, and everything posted to date is still accessible, but it’s not certain for how long.

As everyone familiar with both the site and the list know, no incitement to violence or other illegal action, no attempt to solicit money and no derogatory statement toward any demograhic group have ever appeared on either the mailing list or the news site.

The sole “crime” of which both are guilty is of being anti-war and anti-militarist.

Yours for peace,
Rick Rozoff

I’ve written a guest blog over at the Silver Circle Underground, a blog related to a forthcoming sci-fi film about a future revolt against the Federal Reserve. I was asked to write about what US foreign policy will be like in 2019, when the film is set. I’ve cross-posted it below.

The consistency of United States foreign policy is truly remarkable. Since its inception, America’s approach was expansion and control; first with westward annexation – humbly called Manifest Destiny – and then with interventions and impositions to the south through the Monroe Doctrine. But exceptionally since the end of World War II, US policy has remained notably undeviating.

US national security planners understood, correctly, that unlike war torn Europe America would emerge from the war as an economic and military powerhouse with unrivaled security and influence. The world was divided up into war zones and plans were set to implement an Imperial Grand Strategy over a region encompassing the Western Hemisphere, the Far East, the former British Empire, with a high focus on Middle East oil reserves. As a Top Secret National Security Council briefing put it in 1954, “the Near East is of great strategic, political, and economic importance,” as it “contains the greatest petroleum resources in the world” as well as “essential locations for strategic military bases in any world conflict.”

The primary aim, according to official documents was to maintain “unquestioned power” with “military and economic supremacy,” while ensuring the “limitation of any exercise of sovereignty” by states that might interfere with its global designs. As an illustration of how unchanged the US imperial approach has been, these precise strategies were reiterated in the 2002 National Security Strategy. It was of foremost importance that “our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States.” Similarly, in former Secretary of Defense William Cohen’s 1999 annual report to President Clinton, the crucial task was to “retain the capability to act unilaterally” to prevent “the possibility that a regional great power or global peer competitor may emerge” and to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.”

Maintaining global hegemony through the threat or use of military force has been the singular approach in American foreign policy, and it manifests in ugly ways. Regime changes (often just a synonym for international terrorism) in Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Iraq and more are prime examples.

So to consider what US foreign policy will look like in 2019, a mere eight years from now, is really to consider how little will change. Some specifics may change, as has happened in this Arab Spring – a hated and feared development in the annals in Washington, as it signifies a potential for the policies of Middle East government’s to more closely reflect the will of the people (something national security planners have been actively preventing for decades). But the fundamentals will prove as durable as they have since WWII.

The United States will still have approximately 900 military bases in 150 countries around the world, although the numbers may increase slightly. Our army is likely to still have a presence in Iraq, and a large-scale military occupation will still be going on in Afghanistan. The likelihood of our 53,960 troops being pulled out of Germany, or the 57,586 in South Korea is next to zero. We will still be supporting tyrannies throughout the Middle East in Bahrain, Jordan, Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and perhaps even still Egypt. We will continue to impose a power structure subservient to Washington throughout Latin America, probably fighting the same sorts of proxy wars and drug war adventures we are now. We will still have a massive military industrial complex, a sprawling and unaccountable national security state, and a foreign policy largely dictated by the powerful, with help from the banksters.

One aspect of imperial policy that looks to be changing rather rapidly, although simply upholding the same imperial approach, is air power. Increasingly, military technology has developed such that unmanned, remotely controlled aerial vehicles can bomb countries and assassinate enemies of the state without declaring war, asking the permission of Congress, or even making it public at all. Ominously, this could lead the aggressors in Washington to keep wars increasingly secret and unaccountable.

Some perceive the fall of the American Empire just around the corner, with rising powers like China presenting problems for US global hegemony. But the US domain of power is still too far-reaching. And in 2019, we can expect it to remain the most dominant – and the most violent.

A much underreported story in the press recently was the UN bombing in Abuja, Nigeria by the Nigerian terrorist group Boko Haram. Also known as the Nigerian Taliban, the Muslim group was founded in response to what its founders saw as the westernization of Nigeria, Islam and, specifically, education.

The event was significant in many aspects, but like so many other important global affairs, goes underreported or completely ignored.

Preliminary investigations so far have concluded the following: according to UN security chief, a bomb, probably around 100 pounds, was detonated by a suicide bomber under the reception area of the UN building, only after speeding down the “long driveway,” gathering enough speed to crash through two barriers. An unarmed guard was run over and killed after trying to flag down and stop the speeding suicide bomber. Twenty-three people were killed and seventy-three more were injured in this barbaric attack.

Alleged members of Boko Haram almost immediately claimed responsibility:

“Through the wisdom of Allah, we have launched the attack with absolute precision,” a man who identified himself as Abu Darda told a reporter in Kano on Friday. “We have said it several times that the U.N. is one of our prime targets.” Another man claiming to be a spokesman for Boko Haram, Mallam Abu Kaka, in a telephone conference call on Saturday with reporters in Maiduguri, blamed the United States. “The U.S. government has been collaborating with the Nigerian government to clamp down on our members nationwide,” he said. Both men warned that more attacks were imminent.

While it still has not been verified that those two men were Boko Haram members, Nigeria’s Department of State Services hasapparently already found the culprit:

“Investigation has revealed that one Mamman Nur, a notorious Boko Haram element with al Qaeda links who returned recently from Somalia, working in concert with the two suspects, masterminded the attack on the United Nations building in Abuja,” the Department of State Services said in a statement on Wednesday.

It did not give details of how it came to this conclusion, beyond mentioning that the two suspects in detention before the bombing, which killed 23 people, had given “valuable statements.”

“We implore … the general public to cooperate with security agencies by providing useful information that could lead to the arrest of Mamman Nur, who is hereby declared wanted,” it said.

This attack marks the first by Boko Haram against a non-Nigerian target. Typically, the group attacks police and government officials. This time, however, the group began to diversify and has gone international, in a sense. Not only has Boko Haram gone international, but they’ve struck at the core of the status quo, world order: the UN.

The international flavor that Boko Haram has all of the sudden developed a taste for, as well as their increasingly sophisticated attacks, have led some to believe that the group is in contact with or actively working with al-Qaeda. General Carter Ham, the commander of operations in Africa and, consequently, the director of the Libyan war effort, has said that he has several sources that tell him that Boko Haram has made contacts with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and al-Shabaab, the Somali Islamist group. A Nigerian diplomat in Kenya said that 19 members of Boko Haram had stayed with an al-Shabaab commander in Mogadishu in late 2010. Neither of these statements, nor the Department of State Service’s, have been corroborated or independently verified, so their veracity is in question. General Ham said of the possibility of those three groups working with one another, “I think it would be the most dangerous thing to happen not only to the Africans, but to us as well.”

Such language from high level military brass, as well as Boko Haram’s supposed affiliation with arguably the two most important terrorist groups at the moment–AQIM because of Libya and al-Shabaab because of the drought and the recent American offensive against them–are ominous signs for Nigeria. The US has shown itself to be willing to go literally anywhere if a threat against the US, real or otherwise, emerges. This is especially the case if that country happens to have valuable resources, particularly oil. Lest it’s forgotten, Nigeria is the fifth biggest exporter of oil to the United States. Boko Haram has not, however, shown a willingness to strike in the oil rich, Christian south.

The story continues to get even more interesting and is where the media has dropped the ball yet again. Tucked away in a Washington Post article is a mention of FBI agents on the ground to “assist” the investigation. Deb Maclean, the spokeswoman who came forward with this information, decided to not elaborate any further. What Maclean and the FBI call assisting has many heads in Nigeria spinning.

The Punch, “Nigeria’s most widely read newspaper,” ran a bombshell story that will undoubtedly make President Goodluck Jonathan blush:

OPERATIVES of the United States’ domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, have taken over the investigations of Friday’s bombing of the UN building in Abuja.

Sources told THE PUNCH that the FBI agents probing the bombing had sidelined investigators from the Nigeria Police and the State Security Service.

A source in one of the security agencies, who requested anonymity, said the takeover had the support of the Federal Government. The source added that the government might have lost confidence in the Police, SSS and other security agencies for their alleged failure to halt the bombings in the country.

It’s not clear whether the Nigerian government sought the help of the United States, but complaints about the competency of the State Security Service by government officials give a lot of credence to accusations by PUNCH.

Later in the article, PUNCH notes that the FBI has been involved in Nigerian investigations before, specifically from the October 1, 2010 bombings onward. A cable released by Wikileaks back in December exposed that the US had actionable intelligence concerning Boko Haram. If the US has done this before, what’s all the fuss about?

First, it appears that the US has genuinely hijacked the Nigerian led investigation of this bombing. Second, the rapid and overblown response by the US comes a mere two weeks after General Ham made apocalyptic statements about Boko Haram. And finally, the rapid conclusion reached by the Department of State Services is worthy of several questions: was this reached independent of the FBI? If not, what was the extent of American involvement? If the damning evidence was really gathered from two detainees before the attack, why was the attack not prevented? Incompetence or willful ignorance? Was it gathered through unsavory means, such as torture, or did the detainees come clean?

Many unanswered questions remain, but such heavy handed involvement by the US is a very unsettling development. Could the US be on its way to significant anti-terrorism “operations” in Nigeria, or is this just a one time thing? Only time will tell, but Nigeria and Boko Haram are certainly worth watching.